A new online platform to help facilitate the licensing of copyrighted works in the UK is now being piloted.
The Copyright Hub centralises information on who individuals and businesses need to contact and gain permission from to "copy, adapt, share or distribute" music, text, images, video or other multimedia that is protected by …

COMMENTS

I have always been fiercely against these licenses as if it was not for the DJ's, radio stations etc promoting the artists they would not have a business in the first place. Also requiring people to pay for licences for listening to the radio in a work place is frankly taking the piss.

Not sure about 'promotion'

Most of the online radio stations I listen to don't have DJs and don't 'promote' the music, other than a label popping up to say what the track is called and who it's by. You may have more of a point if it was a local radio station that had an announcer who preceded and followed a track with a plug for "And here's a new track by xxx from their album yyy available at all good music shops, and don't forget they're appearing live at zzz on Saturday night, tickets available from wherever' - then I agree they shouldn't have to pay a licence fee to play it.

Re: Not sure about 'promotion'

Most people buy music from (insert your store / app store here) when they have heard the track. Every time a song is played on air that is promoting it.

In the beginning, the music labels had to beg radio stations to play tracks and now they charge for it. This is like me charging you every time you walk past my theoretical car showroom just because you saw my intellectual property.

Re: The greatest invention ever

... and so the stitch-up of the little guys begins.

So, in order to register your stuff on the copyright hub, you need to cough a membership fee. Which will be negligable for Big Content, but totally discourage you and I from registering our cat pictures, bedroom studio ditties, web page themes and such.

So the big guys will still get to use images we take, and just bung (c)Internet on it.